Raw, Eggless, Flourless Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough (or, You did WHAT to my chickpeas?)

Yep, chickpeas.  Yep, no bake.  Keep reading!  :)  I decided it was time to get better acquainted with my pressure cooker.  I have a Cuisinart electric pressure cooker that I got at Williams Sonoma a few years ago.  I've used it, with much success, several times, but I always forget about it.  Before those of you that know me get worried that I'm going to blow myself up, the electric pressure cooker comes with built in safety features.

So I love a good theme, and I stumbled about several chickpea recipes I've been wanting to try so I decided to dub this upcoming week "Celebrating the Chickpea"  or "Gaga for Garbanzos," I couldn't decide which one was better.  I bought 4 pounds of dry, plain jane chickpeas at Sprouts:

The instruction manual for my pressure cooker says not to fill it more than 1/3 of the way full when cooking beans.  It also gives instructions for cooking one pound at a time, with 8 cups of water.  I read in another recipe to use 3 cups of water to every one cup of beans.  I also read that one pound of uncooked chickpeas is about 3 cups.  So I decided to cook them one pound (3 cups) at a time, with 3 cups of water, a couple of bulbs of garlic, some absolutely onion wildtree seasoning, some garlic galore wildtree seasoning and wildtree rancher's rub, for 55 minutes using the quick release method.  They turned out perfectly.

I was surprised to find a lot of sweet recipes using the gorgeous garbanzo.  Not only is it a good meat substitute, it's also a great flour substitute.  But what really drew me to this recipe was my family.  My cousin Cyndi has a love for raw cookie dough.  I suppose most of us do, but I won't eat it raw because as a child, my mom told me not to because it had raw eggs in it.  That was enough to scare me out of sticking my finger in the bowl or licking the beaters.  My cousin Cyndi however is a fearless rebel who will just go for it. She's just cool like that.  So when I saw an eggless, not ever meant to be baked cookie dough, I had to try it.  So I scrolled down to read the ingredients.  It has chickpeas in it?!??  What?  And no flour or sugar?  After my shock wore off, I decided it was worth a whirl.  I added to the snack/dessert category for recipes to cook this weekend for the upcoming week.  How cool and decadent will it be to have a couple of spoons full of raw cookie dough after dinner?  So here we go, eggless, flourless, healthy-ish raw cookie dough.  First our ingredients:

2 cups cooked garbanzo beans (or 1 15oz can), drained

1/2 cup of peanut butter

2 tbsp of honey (I added a little extra)

1 tsp of vanilla

1/2 cup chocolate chips (the original recipe called for dark chocolate, I used milk)

Put all of the ingredients, except the chocolate chips in the food processor:

And blend until smooth.  Put the "dough" into a bowl and fold in the chocolate chips.  I added a few extra to the top to make it look pretty:

I fed an unsuspecting boyfriend a spoonful this morning and asked him what it was.  He said "Mmm, cookie dough?"  :)  It doesn't taste EXACTLY like cookie dough with all of the bad for you ingredients, but it is a good fake out and it DOES NOT taste like chick peas.  He was shocked when I told him I'd used them in the recipe.  It was quick and easy, and you should try it and see who  you can fake out.  :)

Pinkies!!!

I know what you must be thinking.  Nothing for over a year and then BAM! two posts in one day.  And to that I say: Stop complaining and enjoy the beauty that is this yummy recipe!  I saw this on Pinterest.  It was called Strawberry Brownies.  The Prince is a fan of strawberry desserts, so I decided I should give it a whirl.  When I served him one after dinner and proudly said, "These are strawberry brownies!"  He looked at it and said, "You mean pinkies?"  Not only is that name infinitely cuter, it is in fact more appropriate.  So pinkies it is, and here is how you make them...

Ingredients:

a strawberry cake mix

1/3 cup of oil

2 eggs

1 cup powdered sugar

1 1/2  tablespoons of milk or water

Mix the cake mix, oil and eggs...

Mix the ingredients until it becomes a sort of hard to stir ball of dough.  The recipe said that it would be thick, and this was not an overstatement...

Press the dough into a 9x13 pan...

Bake at 350 for 14 minutes.  That seemed like a very odd, specific time to me, but it was perfect!  They were done at exactly 14 minutes.  Now to make the glaze!  Did I forget to mention there is a glaze?  Well, there is!  In a small bowl combine the powdered sugar with milk or water, your choice.  We split the difference and used half and half...

Stir until you get to this consistency...  I had to add some extra half and half, so just kinda eyeball it...

Spread the glaze on top of the pinkies, cut, serve and eat!  Look how pretty they are...

This is another easy, few ingredient recipe but it was really tasty!  If you don't share the recipe, no one will know how easy it was.  I thought they were the perfect balance of rich, sweet and dense but not too dense.  Try them and let me know what you think!

No Bake Peanut Butter Thumbprint Cookies

I'm baaaaaaack!!!  Back in the kitchen, back to baking... well sort of.  This is a "no bake" recipe so I guess a better description would be that I'm back to kitchen calamity and making fun things to eat.  Yeah, that's it!  Thanks to my new trusty assistant, my sister, Chessa Banks!  (Thanks Chessa for willingly helping and inspiring me to get started again.  Love you, Sister!  :-D)  Ok, let's get started....

Ingredients: 

2 cups graham cracker crumbs

1 cup peanut butter

3/4 cup honey

Jam, jelly, preserves... or in my case chocolate!!!

I subbed the jam/jelly/preserves for chocolate for several reasons, but mainly because my favorite flavor combo in the world is chocolate and peanut butter.  So first things first, we need to make these graham crackers crumby.  We were in my sister's almost adequately equipped kitchen, so we used a blender for this process...

It worked out just fine!  Pour them into a medium bowl and add the peanut butter.  Baking tip of the day:  before you measure your peanut butter, spray your measuring cup with nonstick cooking spray, like this...

Then bask in how amazingly easy it falls out of your measuring cup...

Voila!  Do the same thing when measuring your honey or any other sticky ingredient for that matter.  And for my friend Meredith who says peanut butter isn't sticky, any other messy, pain in the butt to measure ingredient.  :-P  

Stir until all of the ingredients (all three of them) are well combined...

Then roll them approximately one inch balls (Long time readers will know that had I been home, I would have used  my trusty scoop to measure equal amounts, but I wasn't at home.)...

Place them on a cookie sheet and make a "thumbprint" impression...

Then fill the "thumbprints" with the filling of your choice.  I suggest you do what we did.  Throw some dark chocolate chips into a makeshift double boiler...

Then fill the cookies with delicious, silky, slightly scalding chocolate...

Then put the finished tray in the fridge to set up...

These were super simple and are super yummy.  I was wondering how they would set up and was a little skeptical that they would hold their shape, but I was impressed.  They did!  This would be a fun recipe to make with kids.  There are almost no dangerous implements used and you could let them get creative and choose their own fillings for the thumbprints.  (Though if they choose anything other than chocolate, they are wrong.) If you'd like to read the original recipe, you can find it here.  Enjoy!